The fact that Moscow on the Hudson (1984), which
opened 34 years ago today and is as wisely observant about the United States as
an immigrant nation now as then, is a rather patriotic movie only dawned on
director/co-writer Paul Mazursky as he started making it. “Sometimes you don’t
know what you’re doing until you do it,” the filmmaker told biographer Sam Wasson
for the latter’s 2011 Paul on Mazursky.
“It struck me that Moscow was really
about the fact that this is a great, great country. It’s openly done in the
movie. In this country we take in people from everywhere and they bring the
place a juice that if you are lucky
enough to absorb and make use of its pleasures, you can have a much better life
than if you stayed in the same neighborhood for your entire existence. In New
York, you’re within minutes of the Black experience, of the Russian
experiences, of the Yiddish experience, of the Italian, German, Swedish … It’s
all over the city in restaurants, in music, and shops. The only thing they
don’t have is a good Eskimo neighborhood.” The central character of this seriocomic
movie gem (co-written with Leon Capetanos) is the visiting Russian circus
musician and American jazz aficionado Vladimir Ivanoff (played with utterly
enveloping grace and soul by the late, great Robin Williams), who dramatically
decides to defect while his closely guarded company of fellow comrades are on a
good-will shopping excursion to Bloomingdale’s Manhattan flagship store. There,
Vladimir meets a salesgirl (Maria Conchita Alonso) and a security guard
(Cleavant Derricks) who will aid his challenging and heartrending submergence
into the American melting pot. Mazursky recalls: “In Leon’s first draft, the
girl was American. It seemed too dry to me so I changed her into an Italian. In
rewriting it, I saw that I could make a few other changes of ethnicity and
before long, they were all immigrants.”

Williams, who in the estimation of the Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert
“disappears so completely into his quirky, lovable, complicated character that
he’s quite plausible as a Russian,” was not Mazursky’s first candidate for the
part. Dustin Hoffman came to mind first, and he turned it down. Mazursky
remembered: “By then I had also met with Dudley Moore, who said ‘Wish I could
do it, but I don’t think I could.’ He was such a wonderfully funny guy and
sympathetic. He could have played it, but he couldn’t do a Russian accent. He
just wasn’t up to that kind of stuff. And then I met once with Bill Murray – a
very offbeat idea – it didn’t work. Then came Dustin and then Robin.” Hoffman wanted a second crack at the part and
requested one more meeting before a final decision, but by then Mazursky had
met Williams and their deal was sealed. “He deserves enormous credit for that
character. Watching it now, I see that he understood it better than I thought
he did at the time. He’s right in there,” Mazursky remarked. “Robin is smart.
He understood the pain. One of the good things that happened was, without me
knowing quite why I did it, the teacher who I got to teach him Russian – a guy
named David Gunberg – was very familiar with life in Russia. So when Robin worked
with him for three months to learn the language, he must have learned a lot of
good stuff along the way about how tough life was there. He is a very
intelligent man, and as you know, he’s a very humane man. He did Comic Relief.
There were times when he might have been difficult to hold own because he’s
such a genius. He could do a riff now about anything – about your shirt – that
could put you on the floor. We had a good time, though. We genuinely liked each
other.” And Mazursky’s affection for America is deep and abiding. “The
unabashed patriotism of it, of the ending – the scene in the diner. And a
little sentimental too, like [Frank] Capra. I have that rack-focus from the guy’s
sparkler to the Empire State Building. It’s the only rack-focus in the movie. I
hate rack-focuses, but I did it deliberately because I didn’t want to cut. But
yeah, there’s a lot of unabashedly political stuff that we have coming out of
the mouth of the Cuban lawyer [Alejandro Rey], you know. And we play the song Freedom in the end. Yeah, it’s
Capra-esque. An Italian immigrant, wasn’t he?” Moscow on the Hudson, featuring
two Audio Commentaries, a solo by Mazursky and a duet by film historians Julie
Kirgo and Nick Redman, speaks eloquently and movingly to the immigrant in us
all on a marvelous Twilight Time hi-def Blu-ray.